Madness and MacBeth

 

Erinyes

Going through MacBeth with a student—the play that made me first love Shakespeare. And it occurred to me this time through that Shakespeare’s theory of madness is quite different from that of modern psychiatry. 

They treat it as if a physical illness. He thinks it is a spiritual, a moral, problem.

“Unnatural deeds

Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds

To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.

More needs she the divine than the physician.”

“Consider it not so deeply….These deeds must not be thought

After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”

Shakespeare must be listened to, because he is the greatest psychiatrist who ever lived. His greatest accomplishment as a writer is how he gets into the minds of all his characters, even the darkest villains, and expresses so clearly and sympathetically how they think. He knows the human soul.

MacBeth and Lady MacBeth go schizophrenic in classic fashion. MacBeth starts hallucinating as soon as he contemplates the crime. Lady MacBeth eventually sleepwalks and talks to herself. I once stayed in a schizophrenic’s apartment. He did too.

Not to say all schizophrenics go mad due to a guilty conscience. Shakespeare himself suggests not all. “Yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep, who have died holily in their beds.” 

The reason this particular sort of schizophrenic goes “schizophrenic” is from a guilty conscience. They have committed a sin so serious their conscience will not leave them alone. This conforms too with the Ancient Greek idea of the Erinyes. They will track you down for vengeance no matter where you go and what you do.

Of course, in a Christian world, there is no sin as such so serious. Lady MacBeth, or MacBeth,  are Christian, and presumably know this. The problem is that they have so committed their very fate to the sin; they cannot accept the consequences of repentance. It would mean, in their case, by law, losing the crown, and losing their lives.

That is perhaps how narcissists feel. This particular type of “schizophrenia” comes from narcissism. Whether or not literally so, the typical narcissist cannot admit fault, for in their own mind it would mean losing their imaginary crown, having crowned themselves, and losing their life, their settled self-identity.

What modern psychiatry calls narcissism is really vice. Formulaically pride, the chief of all the vices, but it could also be any of the others. This is how vice works. The perp gets so committed to the sin they decide there is no way out. Then they start to hear footsteps, Erinyes, behind them.

“Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?”

“No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting.”

There is fear in that statement.

MacBeth when he hears Fleance, Banquo’s son, has escaped his assassin:

“Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect;

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,

As broad and general as the casing air:

But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in

To saucy doubts and fears.”

And he promptly begins to hallucinate the ghost of Banquo. Fear and doubt are the triggers.

The same thing happens to King Lear. Lear is obviously a “narcissist,” in modern psychiatric terms. When his self-image as king is rocked, he goes mad. Here too there is, or ought to be, a guilty conscience. He has grossly played favourites among his children.

That too is perhaps, in cosmic terms, so great a sin it commonly cannot be admitted.